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It’s Hamas, not Israel, that’s winning in Gaza: Siddiqui

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Gaza militants rain down mostly primitive and mostly ineffective rockets on Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu unleashes some of the most modern and lethal arsenal on Gaza homes, hospitals, health clinics, nursing and rehab centres, mosques and office buildings. Even civilians who had taken shelter in United Nations-run schools are not spared. Gaza’s only power plant is destroyed. More than 1,250 Gazans have been killed, mostly civilians. That’s four times the death toll in the Malaysian Airlines jet shot down over Ukraine.

The world seems helpless. Appeals by the United Nations and other international organizations go unheeded. Even the United States has little or no clout, despite providing Israel $3 billion a year and, more crucially, political cover for decades. Barack Obama has been pleading with Netanyahu to cease fire, to no avail.

More telling has been the obsequious nature of the American appeals to Netanyahu: stop killing, maiming and displacing innocent Palestinian civilians not because such collective punishment is legally and morally wrong but because it is turning world public opinion against Israel and also because growing Palestinian rage, including in the West Bank, may spark a third intifadah.

America’s “morally bankrupt” policy is the result of the pro-Israeli lobby’s stranglehold on American politics, says Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University and co-author, with John Mearsheimer, of the seminal 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which drew both outrage and gratitude.

Walt writes in the Huffington Post: “Obama knows that if he were to side with the Palestinians in Gaza or criticize Israel’s actions in any way, he would face a firestorm of criticism from the lobby and his chances of getting Congressional approval for a (nuclear) deal with Iran would evaporate.”

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There’s another reason for Israel’s relative immunity.

Muslims are being killed by fellow-Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. in far greater numbers. Muslim blood is cheap.

The trouble with that formulation, advanced by some of Israel’s most ardent backers, is that it places democratic Israel in the same company as that of some of the world’s most wretched regimes and militias.

Both Israel and Hamas have their reasons to resist a ceasefire.

Israel wants to destroy not only Hamas rockets and missiles and tunnels but Hamas itself. Most Israelis support that goal.

Hamas wants an end to the siege of Gaza, which dates back to 2007. Most Gazans support that goal, despite the price they are paying.

They are trapped in the narrow, densely populated coastal strip, 40 kilometres long and a few kilometres wide. Gaza’s entrances to Israel and Egypt are closed. (During Arab Spring, Egypt had eased restrictions at its Rafah crossing but the military junta that took over power last year has reimposed them). On the Mediterranean side, Israel restricts Gazan boats to a few nautical miles from shore. It controls Gaza’s airspace. It has also maintained an economic blockade of Gaza. Though Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005, the UN considers the territory occupied by Israel.

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Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, an expert on Gaza, writes about Gaza’s deterioration:

“It was deliberate and planned by Israel, imposed through separation and isolation and through a destructive economic blockade, which virtually bans access to markets outside Gaza and confines the overwhelming majority of people to the Strip . . .

“Unemployment stands at 40.8 per cent; however, for those between 15 and 29 years of age, it is almost 60 per cent. Poverty has increased, with almost 80 per cent made dependent on humanitarian aid to survive although they are able and desperate to work.

“In 2000, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency, responsible for Palestine refugees) was feeding 80,000 people in Gaza; today it feeds over 830,000.

“Yet, UNRWA’s food aid . . . is now under threat as some international donors such as Canada have inexplicably defunded UNRWA or fund at levels that do not meet Gaza’s burgeoning need.”

(This is part of the Stephen Harper government’s policy of diverting humanitarian dollars to pro-Israel security measures.)

Hamas is demanding an internationally backed commitment to end the military and economic siege. It wants an airport and a seaport.

Some of these demands are backed by Turkey and Qatar (acting as intermediaries between the U.S. and Hamas) as well as by the Arab League and the United Nations.

“We can’t simply envision a return to the status quo,” says Pierre Krahenbuhl, former head of UNRWA.

If the Israeli aim was to weaken and marginalize Hamas, the opposite is happening, despite the unconscionable carnage wrought by Israel.

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